In the second of a new series of interviews with top executives from leading healthcare and comms agencies, Fierce Pharma Marketing sat down with London-based Havas SO’s managing director, Joanna Quade and Creative Director, Lucy Doolan.
AI is fast becoming a major theme in these pieces: Some in the industry are worried about jobs being put at risk as pharma clients look for quicker, easier and cheaper projects using this tech, but Quade and Doolan see the fundamentals of engagement—from real people, to real people—as remaining paramount.
“AI helps with efficiencies when it comes to things like production, but creativity and ideas, well that can only really come from people,” said Doolan.
“Clients obviously want to pay less if they can [for an agency’s work], and I think people are trying to see what they can create using AI,” she said.
But what Doolan sees happening is that while cost-cutting is attractive, clients will “come back around and realize the value of creativity and human creativity, and the fact that AI is a tool; it's the kind of paintbrush that we use, but actually the idea has to come from human beings.”
When talking about health to doctors and especially patients, connection is key. “I think you have to understand what people are going to resonate with, really by speaking to human beings, building relationships, understanding a patient perspective,” she said.
“We do a lot of patient engagement work here; that could only come from a human being, that real nuance of what's going to really land, what's really going to be powerful, looking at humor, like what's really funny.”
Try and try to get AI to be funny, Doolan said, and you start to see its limitations.
Quade explained that she thinks, in fact, that “the human bit is going to become more and more and more important.”
That’s because while you can create efficiencies with AI, and produce a lot of content quickly, she says companies must ask: is it good content?
“Mostly no," she said. “There’s a statistic that we talk about where everyday people are inundated with so much information. I think it's like 34 gigabytes of information, which is enough to block an actual computer within hours.”
This means people are “just going to filter all of the content that AI generates because it just creates a sea of sameness.”
This is where genuine connection comes through, and the authenticity in messaging this creates.
Havas SO works closely with patient communities, and Quade said that you “don't build influence by just pushing messages out, and we think historically 10 years ago maybe communications and PR were great at developing content, pushing it out, and then that was almost the sign of success.”
This doesn’t cut it anymore, however, and Quade said you now “have to connect with your audiences a different way.”
Tangible marketing and racist bread
Doolan sees “physical experiences” as becoming more valuable in the future for pharma marketing. “Something tangible; something you will be able to candidly touch or engage with, something in the real world will become more valuable across audiences.”
Havas SO has been putting that into practice itself. Doolan and Quade had been working on the agency’s Cannes Lions project for The Cybersmile Foundation called “Stop the Forced Feed”.
The idea behind that project was a “forced algorithm” of harmful content and its impact, especially on the young. According to Doolan: “We found this stat that said within 17 minutes of being online, young boys are fed masculinist anti-feminist content to their feed on social media. They don't go looking for it ... and we kind of thought that was really terrifying, but interesting that they don't go looking for it—it just gets pushed to them.”
This spawned the idea of being “forced fed” content, which they turned into a physical campaign.
“I think it's interesting if you think about what the digital world feeds you versus what you feed yourself when it comes to food. I think if you put what you often see on social media into the real world, into the real environment, you'd be horrified. So that's what we did.
“We took these data and we turned it into a range called 'algorithms', and we fed it to politicians, to influencers, to journalists,” Doolan said. This saw the creation of physical bags of food, including black packaged “Racist White Bread,” and “Misogyny Eggs.”
Pop-up retail activations in Tesco retail stores also brought the concept to members of the public, turning a complex digital issue into something tangible and thought-provoking.
Doolan said that on the topic of AI, “I think we literally hand-painted over 1,000 products black. I don't think the production team were ever looking at eggs in the same way again.”